


Even While We Sleep

by slamjam



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, discussion of triggers, eleven is not a monster, mention of Chief Hopper, much angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-08-13 05:52:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7964971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slamjam/pseuds/slamjam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She looked Mike dead in the eyes and told him “For all the good I’ve done, I could still hurt you.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Even While We Sleep

**Author's Note:**

> this went so many places man. it is a Frankenstein's monster of a story (originally intended as the last chapter of [Grow A Thicket Of Brambles](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7827370/chapters/17867089)but it wanted to go in a different direction, altho this could totally be seen as canon post-fic... hmmmm). Honestly i should probably edit this a lot more but i am Not risking me fucking up this ending by rewriting El's emotional dump for like the 5th time. It's set quite a bit later than the end of the last ep. and El has become significantly more comfortable talking (especially with people she trusts like Mike).  
> Title from [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST86JM1RPl0) (It also happens to be the song the kids are listening to in the beginning).
> 
> TW for a part where El tries to explain how triggers work (and fails miserably because i am Bad at the Explaining)
> 
> EDIT: Oct. 2017, went back n changed some minor things, added some spacing because damn girl that formatting was trash. I'm READY for S2!!!!! And procrastinating on an essay but whatcha gonna do.

El's lying flat on her back in Mike’s room, bobbing her head to the music from his speaker system. Eleven knows Mrs. Wheeler doesn’t like it, girls aren’t supposed to be in boys rooms, they’re supposed to be separate like rice and ketchup, but once your kids kill monsters without you things change. The Wheelers are scared of their children now. They’ve seen the gore on their son’s face and two boys with a vice grip on their daughter’s waist, and forced to know that their babies aren’t babies anymore. They are capable and willing to kill, and once you know that you change. Sometimes for the better she thinks, recalling Hop’s insistence on teaching all the kids how to safely fire a gun and Joyce’s calm steely-eyed determination as she got information on shell shock and finding whatever outside help she could wrangle with her limited means. But sometimes, you never meant for your children to grow up and you became the Wheelers, tiptoeing around your children’s rooms, acquiescing and crying alone in bed at night.  
  
Mike flopped down on the bed sighing loud enough for it to be reasonably called a yell and El snorted. She was the objective one whenever Mike got himself worked up. 

“You kids balance each other out,” Joyce had told her while spreading mayo on sandwich bread “Mike’s better in the “teen angst” department than Lucas and Will, and, I’d argue Jonathan when he was your age, but he still has his moments.” She laughed softly, remembering. “This is a hard age for a lot of people, it always has been, what with people trying to figure out who they are and what they feel”  
  
“Like me” El said, not looking up from her worksheet.  
  
“Yeah, sort of, and I wish to God that-“ she stopped herself. “You’re finding yourself for the first time, and if things are different then they will be. But, just make sure that, that you’re not just seeing yourself as something to balance the boys out. Be your own person, alright?”  
  
“Alright.”  
  
“Good, good” Joyce mumbled, and turned back to the sandwich. “You want onions on this kiddo?” 

Mike let out another comically loud sigh, and she looked up at him, he was starting to slide off the bed headfirst. She reached out and grabbed his leg to pull him back but he said “This is my fate El, the world wants me to fall off the bed like a giant lump.”  
  
She gave a little tug and he yelped and gave a little halfhearted kick but otherwise just kept sliding further off the bed.  
Another tug, “Mike.”  
  
A tiny grumble floated up from the floor. “Stop sulking, you’re pulling all the sheets off.”  
  
“You can’t fight gravity.”  
  
She laughed, “I can and I know you hate making your bed, and I’m not doing it.”  
  
“Damn you and your common sense.” He grumbled as he preformed some sort of clumsy gymnastic maneuver to get his body unstuck from the side of the bed and the landslide of sheets that he had pulled down with him. “I don’t think you even know how to make a bed.”  
  
“Do too, Mrs. Beyers taught me.”  
  
“That was nice of her, would have been nicer if you had told my mom that you knew how to do it yourself.”  
  
“I don’t know how to wash the sheets.” It was nice to have Mrs. Wheeler make her bed sometimes, she could imagine when looking at the newly made bed that it was done out of love.  
  
“I can teach you how to do laundry if you want. Or you could wait for my mom to get fed up and teach you herself.” She doubted he really knew how to do laundry, and doubted even harder that Mrs. Wheeler would ever reach that point but really it was the thought that counted. Finally disentangled, he flopped back on the bed next to her and she scooted over to use his stomach as a pillow. He huffed a little but kept silent, and they laid there listening to the songs fade into one another.  
  
El watched a dust mote float slowly through the air and wondered if she could make it stop. It stopped. She wondered if she could make a heart stop just as easily. God, that was dark but it was a line of questioning that kept coming up with more and more frequency these days. Most likely she could considering past actions, but there was no way of knowing and she was not about to find out on her own. But the fact that Hawkins Lab might in fact have the answers left open a path that she had refused to let herself go down. She almost didn’t want to know what she was capable of lest the people around her decide that it was really best for her to go back. Maybe, maybe it was better, but maybe she was being overdramatic, and it wouldn’t really be that bad. She needed to know.  
  
“Are you scared of me.” It came out louder than she’d meant it.  
  
“No? Why would I be?” He replied lazily.  
  
“My powers.”  
  
“They never bothered me from the beginning. You use them for good like a superhero, and it’s kinda cool that you can sense and do what you do.”  
  
“What if I didn’t use them for good all the time.”  
  
“What are you talking about?” El could hear him shifting above her, she moved off so that he could sit up straight. “In the… place with the cars?” She couldn’t name it. “Junkyard?” Mike supplied and she nodded, continuing, “Junkyard. I hurt Lucas.”  
  
“But you didn’t mean to! I know you didn’t! You just lost control because he was being an ass about the compass thing, you didn’t really want to hurt him.” She sat up and looked away, couldn’t meet his eyes.  
  
“Did you?”  
  
“NO” she almost yelled, “I just. What happens the next time I lose control?”  
  
“You won’t, you’re safe now.” Mike said, consoling.  
  
“That’s not how it works Mike, I could get angry or scared from anything and hurt someone or something.”  
  
“I can explain to you what’s going on so you won’t get so upset! And everyone else can do the same thing! Nothing’s going to try and hurt you anymore like it was in…where you were.”  
  
“It’s not not-knowing what things are. I know I’m safe it’s just remembering when I was being hurt.”  
“Well then don’t think about it?” Mike suggested so confused and sweet El wanted to tear her new hair out strand by strand.  
“That’s not. How. It works.” She muttered, and scrubbed her face with her hands, tried to think of the words to explain. “That kid who beat you up.”  
  
“Troy.” Mike supplied. “Troy." She turned to him, "When you think about him are you scared?”  
  
“Yeah” he admitted, looking away.  
  
“Imagine that whenever you see…” She looked around the room for something right, “a hat. It’s normal. But you are scared of it because it reminds you of him. And you might see it every day.”  
  
He nodded slowly, “So you get scared. But you haven’t lost control every time you got scared!”  
  
Shitting damn Mike. “But when I do I...”  
  
“But when you do, what?”  
  
“I could have killed him!” she yelled. “Maybe I should be back there. Mike I know what I can do. What I did to those bad people, before the demigorgon”  
  
“El”, Mike said hoarsely but she kept going  
  
“I squeezed their brains until they died.” She was shaking. “I could hurt people, a lot of people by accident, just because I was angry or scared and couldn’t control myself.”  
  
“But-“  
  
She looked Mike dead in the eyes and told him “For all the good I’ve done, I could still hurt you.”

And there it was spoken aloud for the first time, twisting Mike’s face into ugly emotions that she couldn’t name and threatening to spill down his cheeks, she had to look away. She twisted the sheets at her sides into knots in the silence that followed. She was terrified of her own hands, of her own body, a weapon that no one knew how to operate. It was time that he knew exactly what the hell she was before things went any further. Papa had said that no one would ever love her because of what she was and damn it this was the proof she needed, she should just go turn herself in right this instant. A loaded gun in children’s hands, the wolf in sheep’s clothing-  
  
“Lucas hurt you too.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Lucas hurt you too." She looked up and Mike was looking straight at her, no flinching. "He said some horrible things about you that he had no right to say. When you were gone I fought with him about that.”  
“That doesn’t mean I should have done that-“  
“I know but you couldn’t have fought back with words at the time. If he said something like that about me and I had your powers, I would have done the same thing.” He was looking at her intently, tensed forwards like she’d only seen a few times before. “You’re not some kind of monster for wanting to fight back El, you’re just like the rest of us.”  
  
“I can’t trust myself Mike.” Her voice cracked into whispers.  
  
“I trust you. I mean I jumped off a cliff because I knew you’d be there to catch me, I think that’s gotta mean something.”  
  
And that’s really all there was to say about that, so El let go.  
  
She let her face crumble into a funny choked sob, let him pull her into his arms, face against his chest his heart beating triple time into her cheekbones, she howled. Ugly cried into his striped shirt, until she had smeared snot and tears all over it, but it felt strangely good? Like something was being released. In a deep place inside there was a softening of a callous that had grown steadily for years. It would take years for her know what had started to happen, but from this moment forward Eleven knew like breathing that she was loved. She stopped crying eventually, but there was no pressure to leave, so she shifted to sit up straighter, dug her face into Mike’s shoulder and stayed. The song from the speakers faded and was replaced, and the slats of heavy sunlight streaming through the blinds started to fall lower on her face, but Mike had his hand running through her hair just like Nancy used to do, so she hardly noticed a thing.

**Author's Note:**

> Mike totally stole Nancy's sweet ass soundsystem once she went off to college (also there was a very very very subtle Jon/Nancy/Steve reference if u caught it). Also: They did end up talking about what was stressing Mike earlier, El was knowingly letting it breathe so that she could bring it up later and then whoops her own feelings got in the way for a bit. k love y'all bye.
> 
> (p.s. even tho this is set later than the last ep. of the series the kids are too young for the fact that they're hanging out in Mike's bedroom to be Indicative Of Anything just making it clear. That shit's gross. Mike may like her in a puppy love sort of way but he loves her in a platonic way first.)


End file.
